Richard Halliburton: the hero time forgot
Seventy-five years ago, famed adventurer and travel writer Richard Halliburton set sail on a doomed junk trip from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But why, asks Stuart Heaver, has such an adored daredevil fallen off history's radar?
He was the most successful celebrity travel writer and adventurer of his generation and 75 years ago this week Richard Halliburton’s ultimate adventure – a trip in a sailing junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco – ended in tragedy.
Halliburton was what we now might call an adrenalin junkie, a publicity seeker and a professional celebrity, but he was also an accomplished writer whose bestselling books introduced international travel to thousands of homes in Middle America during the interwar years.
Those books narrate in enthusiastic Boys’ Own prose how the swashbuckling explorer swims the entire length of the Panama Canal, secures the deathbed confession from the executioner of the Russian royal family, follows in the footsteps of Carthaginian general Hannibal by riding an elephant over the Alps and photographs Mount Everest from a biplane.
Considering he was a charismatic adventurer who courted publicity and enjoyed massive international fame, it is bewildering that, unlike contemporaries Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, his name faded from public attention so quickly. He spent the final few months of his life in Hong Kong but hardly anyone here has heard of Richard Halliburton.
He turned his travel and adventures into a lucrative business, with bestselling books, newspaper serialisations and lucrative lecture tours. He was invited to meet United States president Herbert Hoover, rubbed shoulders with senators and gossip columns linked him with high-profile movie stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Basil Rathbone and Charlie Chaplin. With his dashing good looks he was invited to star in his own Hollywood movie and dined with leading literary figures such as fellow Princeton University student F. Scott Fitzgerald. Renowned television news anchor Walter Cronkite, American intellectual Susan Sontag and travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux have all acknowledged Halliburton as a major influence on their professional lives, but you rarely see his work on the shelves of modern bookshops.
As if the life and personality of Halliburton needed any further embellishment, he was bisexual in an era when handsome macho adventurers in the mould of Indiana Jones were strictly heterosexual, at least as far as their adoring audiences were concerned.